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Martin Kippenberger

08.09.2016 – 27.11.2016

Martin Kippenberger (born 1953 in Dortmund, died 1997 in Vienna) is one of the most important and simultaneously controversial artists of the twentieth century. “Self-promoter”, “enfant terrible”, art-punk”, “bogey of the bourgeoisie”, “unique artist” – the labels stamped on Kippenberger are as numerous as they are vacuous, but nearly always concentrate on the artist’s exceptional personality. Kippenberger’s complex work embracing painting, drawing, object art, writing, photography, installation and performance, also collecting and curatorial activities, leads all platitudes about being an artist and the art business by the nose. Humorously and mercilessly, Kippenberger lampoons the genius cult, “painter heroes”, art criticism and Christian iconography just as he does likewise with concept and minimal art. His art pivots on dialogue and communication. The autumn exhibition of the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien is devoted for the first time after the major Kippenberger-retrospectives in the London Tate, the New York MoMA and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin to a single aspect: the medium of “language”, which Kippenberger favoured throughout his oeuvre. His manic work tempo, the habit of integrating “everything and everyone” into his artistic work, also a unique ability to get scent of the contradictions in the zeitgeist, break ground primarily through language – on the level of the picture title, as text in picture, the pun and the bad joke, misunderstanding, the slogan, as rhyme or also in the form of artists’ books, stickers and posters. “I’m more of a representative than anything else. Sell and communicate ideas. I am after all far more for people than just someone who paints pictures,” said Martin Kippenberger, who, with language as the nucleus of his art, is aligned in the tradition of Dada and concrete poetry.

The exhibition is being produced in close cooperation with the Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain/Cologne.